Written evidence submitted by the Royal British Legion.
1.1 The Royal British Legion (RBL) is at the heart of a national network that supports our Armed Forces community through thick and thin – ensuring that their unique contribution is never forgotten. We were created as a unifying force for the military charity sector at the end of the First World War and remain one of the UK’s largest membership organisations. The RBL is the largest welfare provider in the Armed Forces charity sector, helping veterans young and old, serving personnel, and families. We help with employment, financial issues, respite, and recovery, through to lifelong care and independent living. For further information, please visit www.britishlegion.org.uk.
1.2 RBL and Poppyscotland have long engaged with UK and devolved governments, and local administrations, on Covenant policy and delivery, including that of the Armed Forces Covenant Legal Duty (‘Covenant Duty’).
1.3 In December 2024, RBL hosted a workshop (‘Covenant Workshop’), attended by around 40 participants UK-wide, to engage with local and devolved government stakeholders to discuss potential areas to which the Armed Forces Covenant Duty will be extended in scope. The aim of the workshop was to understand existing stakeholder experiences and learnings through delivering services and support in line with the Armed Forces Covenant, and the Covenant Duty introduced in 2022. Findings from this workshop feature throughout this submission to illustrate experiences and insights from the existing Armed Forces Covenant and the Legal Duty.
2.1 The government must extend the Armed Forces Covenant Duty to include UK and devolved governments and cover all policy matters.
2.2 The government should prioritise policy areas for Covenant expansion as follows: alongside health, housing and education, include social care; employment; early years support; higher and further education; welfare benefits, compensation and pensions; justice and immigration.
2.3 The government should deliver regularly updated training, that is mandatory for those developing policy and delivering frontline services in line with the Covenant Duty. This should include the definition and expectations of ‘due regard’, and key information about the Armed Forces community.
2.4 The government should implement a dedicated programme of promotion activity on the Armed Forces Covenant, and Covenant Duty, accessible to all. In order to improve awareness of the positive contribution of the Armed Forces and to ensure veterans feel recognised for their service.
2.5 The government should provide substantial, and sustainable, funding to ensure that departments within scope are able to effectively implement the expanded Covenant Duty. This should include ringfenced funding to implement regular and robust evaluations of impact of the extension of the Covenant Duty, with clear recommendations for improvement.
3.1 The Covenant is a wide-ranging promise from the nation to the Armed Forces community that they will face no disadvantage in the provision of services and that special treatment may be appropriate in some cases. That broad promise between society and the Armed Forces community allows the practical effects of the Covenant to constantly flex with the ever-changing needs of the Armed Forces community.
3.2 RBL’s 2021 review of the first decade of the Covenant observed: “For many, the Covenant’s greatest success was not any individual policy or action, but the framework it has provided for opening conversations to drive change between all actors in society who support the Armed Forces community.”[1]
3.3 Currently, all UK and devolved government departments, all local authorities within Great Britain, four councils in Northern Ireland, as well as over 12,000 businesses and charities, are signatories of the Covenant.
3.4 In November 2022, the Covenant was strengthened by the introduction of the Covenant Duty, as part of the Armed Forces Act 2021. This created a new legal duty on specified public bodies “to have due regard to the principles of the Armed Forces Covenant when exercising certain statutory functions in the fields of healthcare, education and housing.”[2]
3.5 RBL reviewed the first year of the new Covenant Duty in the autumn of 2023 by interviewing 24 organisations subject to the Duty’s provisions.[3] We were pleased to report that the Duty had acted as catalyst for a wide range of action among those organisations now obliged to meet its requirements. This ranged from updates to webpages, the appointment of new responsible personnel, and new staff training; through to wholescale reviews and refreshes of Covenant commitments, the forming of new partnership boards, and the creation of bespoke Covenant impact assessments. This review also unearthed the main challenges of the Duty; which will be explored in more detail below; of the additional burden on resource and time without any new funding, and the limitations of the scope of the Duty to only specified organisations and policies.
4.1 Challenges with the Armed Forces Covenant are primarily founded in the limitations of the Legal Duty. Policy areas whereby the Duty currently does not apply, but would benefit from such legal precedent, include social care; employment; early years support; higher and further education; welfare benefits, compensation and pensions; justice and immigration. Data from Veterans Gateway – an online and telephone helpline for veterans - indicate that employment and finance feature prominently as common challenges facing veterans, alongside health and housing queries, despite these policy areas being excluded from the existing Covenant Duty.
4.2 The RBL/ Poppyscotland Covenant Workshop identified several areas of disadvantage for the Armed Forces community that currently sit outside the scope of the Covenant Duty. Notably, several participants identified that the interface between health and social care was not captured within the Duty. Despite social care being recognised as an area where many in the Armed Forces community require support, participants highlighted a variety of instances whereby social care provision was far more limited than co-occurring healthcare provision. The 25,000 veterans in care homes in England have unique social, emotional and physical health needs as a result of their experiences in service, and voluntary initiatives such as the Veteran Friendly Framework (VFF) help to deliver improved health and wellbeing outcomes to these veterans. An expanded Covenant Duty could help to deliver better outcomes for veterans in care across the UK.
4.3 Employment is widely recognised as an area of disadvantage, particularly for veterans, and spouses and partners of serving personnel. Stakeholders in both England and Scotland noted that higher mobility, owing to service in the Armed Forces, created unique challenges for spouses and partners of serving personnel to start and maintain a career. This is compounded particularly for those on overseas assignments, and families are sometimes forced to separate to maintain the careers of both partners. Whilst initiatives such as the Defence Employer Recognition Scheme (ERS) were identified as positive, the consensus was that the Covenant Duty could go further to mitigate disadvantage for this group in providing more support to access sustainable employment.
4.4 Criminal justice currently sits outside of the Covenant Duty, which creates a disconnect between the Ministry of Justice and local services in creating consistency of tailored provision for the Armed Forces community within the Justice system. Positive initiatives include Veterans in Custody Support Officers (VICSOs) which operate in every prison establishment in Scotland and in some of the HM Prison & Probation Service estate, and examples of good practice for identifying veterans at various stages in the Justice system. However, a lack of consistency and resource remains a key challenge, which could be mitigated through consistent application of the Covenant Duty across local and national services.
4.5 Non-UK serving personnel, veterans and families are a group who sometimes face unique, often profound, disadvantage because of service and is a group to whom the Covenant principles of no disadvantage and special consideration are often pertinent. The cost of visa fees, and additional financial implications of immigration, mean that non-UK serving personnel and their families are often at a disadvantage when establishing and sustaining family life in the UK. RBL and Poppyscotland have long campaigned for the removal of Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR) visa fees for families of serving personnel who have already obtained ILR for themselves. This would rightly recognise the sacrifices made by this group and meet the government’s obligation under the Covenant to remove disadvantage and promote family life.
4.6 The interaction between welfare benefits and military compensation is an area of disadvantage for the Armed Forces community currently not included in the Covenant Duty. In means tests for Pension Credit, military compensation awards are treated as income and result in some of our poorest veterans and their families being pushed beyond the threshold for support, missing out on thousands of pounds that civilians can access. This also arises in benefits paid out by local authorities including Housing Benefit, Council Tax Support, Discretionary Housing Payments, and Disabled Facilities Grants. The treatment of military compensation as income within means test for welfare benefits, on both a local and national level, disadvantages military compensation recipients within the Armed Forces community compared to their equivalent civilian peers.
5.1 The effectiveness of the Armed Forces Covenant is predicated on the meaningful application of its principles, a strong awareness amongst those delivering it, and robust governance frameworks. Throughout RBL and Poppyscotland’s engagement with stakeholders, several key issues with these principles were identified.
5.2 One of the main challenges with the current Covenant Duty had been the lack of any new funding to accompany it. There was a strong theme from local government stakeholders across the UK, that their services were already struggling and increasing their legal responsibilities was a concern, without any new funding from central government. One Covenant Workshop participant noted, “if there’s not [the] money to do it, it will not be done.”
5.3 Workshop participants identified that inconsistent understanding and implementation of the Armed Forces Covenant would be addressed by expanding the scope of the Duty and mandating staff subject to the Duty to take up the available training. Those representing public sector organisations noted that there were some excellent e-learning opportunities currently being delivered, which was now mandatory on internal learning platforms for some staff. Many stakeholders agreed that standardised and mandatory training was essential, as many of the resources that existed did not have consistent content, ringfenced funding, or central ownership to ensure it is regularly updated.
5.4 Stakeholders across the UK noted concerns that any service that is not a statutory service was at risk of being cut or abolished altogether. Local Armed Forces Covenant partnership boards were highlighted as essential for sharing best practice and learning from different service providers. For example, there remains a high demand for webinars to continue connecting organisations involved in delivering the Armed Forces Covenant around the United Kingdom. These insights if taken into account in the implementation of the extension of the Covenant Duty would result in a more consistent standard of support delivery to the Armed Forces community, regardless of location.
5.5 Concerns remained about the access to individual redress if a relevant authority has failed to demonstrate due regard to their Covenant Duty. The MoD clarified that the routes of redress were through the relevant Ombudsman and ultimately through the courts. The legal route has not been tested yet. Participants in Scotland felt the reason it had not been tested yet was because individuals did not understand their rights to seek redress, rather than because public service providers in scope always met their obligations to demonstrate due regard.
6.1 RBL and Poppyscotland believe that the Armed Forces Covenant Duty should be extended to cover all policy matters, and UK and devolved governments at all levels. Members of the Armed Forces community are affected by decisions and access services from national, devolved, regional, and local organisations. Even where service delivery is local, central and devolved governments are key sources of funding, policy, requirements and accountability. A common Duty across all levels and areas of government will ensure consistency and clarity for the Armed Forces community from public services at all levels.
6.2 One of the original intentions of the Covenant is to “influence policy, service delivery and standards” recognising that “in many cases these will be a responsibility of central government departments and devolved administrations but, in other cases, responsibility will lie with local service providers or organisations within the voluntary or commercial sectors.[4]” This statement rightly recognises the range of actors involved in delivery of the Covenant, as well as different areas of policy, and their interfaces. Currently, there is a barrier to upholding these standards where policy areas are closely integrated but Covenant commitments do not align; for example, with health care which is subject to the Covent Duty, and social care which is not. Expanding the Covenant Duty would enable all layers of government to plan and deliver policy and services according to the Covenant principles.
6.3 From its inception, the Covenant was designed with the flexibility to respond to changing needs of the Armed Forces Community over time. The concern was raised in our Workshop that limiting the Covenant to specific policy areas could inadvertently make way for disadvantage in other areas that had not been anticipated or stifle efforts to respond to unforeseen changes in need. Workshop participants agreed that a blanket Duty across all policy areas and government departments would be a sensible way to protect against new and emerging trends of disadvantage the Armed Forces may face in the future.
6.1 The principle of this concern also applies in respect of devolution to Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, as well as areas of English devolution that is more fragmented. For example, stakeholders in Scotland noted ineffective attempts to introduce initiatives from England to Scotland which do not transfer because of the existing way services are provided. They highlighted the recent removal of local connection tests in England, which had been abolished in Scotland already, and Service Pupil Premium which is unnecessary as there are already funding streams for Service children in place in Scotland. Additionally, it should be noted that Op Restore, Op Courage, Op Community do not exist in the devolved nations and devolved governments are designing their own pathways to fill those gaps. Policy and public service delivery are different in all the devolved nations. The Covenant Duty should apply to devolved governments and oblige them to design and deliver services to meet the changing needs of their Armed Forces communities.
7.1 Workshop participants identified ‘clarity’ as a key difference full implementation of the Covenant Duty would have, if applied across policy areas broadly, to understanding and valuing the Covenant principles. Currently, it makes little sense to the Armed Forces community in understanding which policies or public bodies the existing Duty applies to, and which are out of scope.
7.2 The commitment to further enshrine the Covenant into law is strongly supported by RBL, Poppyscotland and key stakeholders. Workshop participants felt it would give a renewed sense of invigoration into delivery and awareness of the Covenant. The success of the Duty in its limited scope so far is strong evidence of the potential for more new and creative ways to support the Armed Forces community to emerge if extended. Full implementation by its very nature would bring more services and people into the Covenant conversation which could only lead to more positive outcomes because of the publicity and promotion around the introduction of the expansion of the Covenant.
7.3 Although there is no evidence of any Covenant delivery being scaled back, there was a feeling that it was important, owing to the current pressures on public spending, to reinforce effective support for the Armed Forces community with a stronger and broader Duty. It was important for service delivery but also, and more broadly, general policy development that may also impact the Armed Forces community.
7.4 The extension of the Covenant Duty would reinforce the importance of high-level buy-in and political leadership, to ensure that organisations continue to prioritise the delivery of the Armed Forces Covenant, particularly in terms of creating action plans and continuing to evaluate past activity.
8.1. The government must extend the Armed Forces Covenant Duty to include UK and devolved governments and cover all policy matters.
8.2. The government should prioritise policy areas for Covenant expansion as follows: alongside health, housing and education, include social care; employment; early years support; higher and further education; welfare benefits, compensation and pensions; justice and immigration.
8.3. The government should deliver regularly updated training, that is mandatory for those developing policy and delivering frontline services in line with the Covenant Duty. This should include the definition and expectations of ‘due regard’, and key information on the Armed Forces community.
8.4. The government should implement a dedicated programme of promotion activity on the Armed Forces Covenant, and Covenant Duty, accessible to all. In order to improve awareness of the positive contribution of the Armed Forces and to ensure veterans feel recognised for their service.
8.5. The government should provide substantial, and sustainable, funding to ensure that departments within scope are able to effectively implement the expanded Covenant Duty. This should include ringfenced funding to implement regular and robust evaluations of impact of the extension of the Covenant Duty, with clear recommendations for improvement.
24th January 2025
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[1] RBL, The Armed Forces Covenant: Reflections on a decade of the nation's promise (2021)
[2] Ministry of Defence, Statutory Guidance on the Armed Forces Covenant Duty (2022)
[3] RBL, The Armed Forces Covenant Duty – One Year On (2023)
[4] Ministry of Defence (2011), The Armed Forces Covenant, p. 6, available at the_armed_forces_covenant.pdf